Psi is a letter in the early Cyrillic alphabet

Early Cyrillic alphabet

The Early Cyrillic alphabet is a writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the 9th or 10th century to write the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language...

, derived from the Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

 letter psi

Psi (letter)

Psi is the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet and has a numeric value of 700. In both Classical and Modern Greek, the letter indicates the combination /ps/ . The letter was adopted into the Old Italic alphabet, and its shape is continued into the Algiz rune of the Elder Futhark...

 (Ψ, ψ). It represents the sound /ps/, as in English naps. According to the school rules developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Meletius Smotrytsky

Meletius Smotrytsky

Meletius Smotrytsky , né Maksym Herasymovytch was a Ruthenian linguist from Galicia, author and religious activist. Son of the famous Ukrainian religious and political activist Herasym Smotrytsky. He was educated in Ostroh and Vilnius, as well as Leipzig, Wittenberg and Nuremberg...

's grammar book, it was intended for use in words loaned from Greek—but it was occasionally used for writing native words, for example Ukrainian ѱы (psy, “dogs”). It was used especially in words relating to the Church, as can be seen in its continuing use in Church Slavonic.
Psi was eliminated from Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

 and Kazakh

Kazakh language

Kazakh is a Turkic language which belongs to the Kipchak branch of the Turkic languages, closely related to Nogai and Karakalpak....

 orthographies

Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...

 along with ksi, omega

Omega (Cyrillic)

Omega is a letter used in the early Cyrillic alphabet. Its name and form are derived from the Greek letter Omega .Unlike Greek, the Slavic languages had only a single /o/ sound, so Omega was little used compared to the letter On , descended from the Greek letter Omicron...

, and yus

Yus

Little Yus and Big Yus , or Jus, are letters of the Cyrillic script, representing two Common Slavonic nasal vowels in the early Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets. Each can occur in iotified form , formed as ligatures with the letter Decimal I...

 in the Civil Script of 1708 (Peter the Great

Peter I of Russia

Peter the Great, Peter I or Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov Dates indicated by the letters "O.S." are Old Style. All other dates in this article are New Style. ruled the Tsardom of Russia and later the Russian Empire from until his death, jointly ruling before 1696 with his half-brother, Ivan V...

's Grazhdanka), and has also been dropped from other secular languages. It continues to be used in Church Slavonic.

Computing codes

character
Unicode name	CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER PSI		CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER PSI
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...	1136	0470	1137	0471
UTF-8 UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...	209 176	D1 B0	209 177	D1 B1
Numeric character reference Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode...	Ѱ	Ѱ	ѱ	ѱ